How Brands Get Into AI Answers: GEO's Trust Mechanisms and Engineering Practices

What actually makes Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) work is a series of conditions along the retrieval chain: whether content can be recalled, whether entities can be aligned, whether facts can be verified, and whether citations can be traced. The article breaks this chain down, proposes three hard requirements—recallability, alignability, and verifiability—and presents reproducible sampling and attribution methods, including question set construction, repeated sampling no fewer than 3 times with intervals of no less than 6 hours, and three metrics: mention rate, citation rate, and traceable citation rate.